


can flowers be blue?

by heliianth



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: (bc i cant resist), 5+1 Things, Blind Peter Parker, Character Study, Deaf Harley Keener, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Kinda?, M/M, Pining Morons to Lovers, Precious Peter Parker, gonna be honest this is the ramblings of a rat child at 1:42 AM on a school night, its got uhh, listen i dont know what this is, why are you asking me for tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23890450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliianth/pseuds/heliianth
Summary: 5 times Peter asked what colors were like and 1 time Harley asked him what sound was like.
Relationships: Harley Keener & Tony Stark, Harley Keener/Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 82





	can flowers be blue?

**Author's Note:**

> blind!Peter and deaf!Harley AU i've been rattling around for a while.
> 
> this fic is kinda some mindless gay fluff to cheer my sad ass up and also get me back into writing. hope it cheers you up too! bc the earth sucks a little rn
> 
> pls enjoy <3

_"I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields, while I learned new words and the names of things. Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived."_

_Helen Keller on_ Smell, the Fallen Angel

* * *

Sweat and cologne and the distinct air of jet fuel, the metallic scent of a thunderstorm. That’s what the new intern smelled like. He’d been up in the air, soaring above the ground, higher and higher and higher. A million questions sprouted on his tongue, a prickly forest of comments and inquiries. Their branches rattled with chatter and their leaves shook with anticipation of an answer.

_Did he look down? What did he see, what color was it?_ Colors were fascinating to Peter. Blue wasn’t just a shade of the sky, whatever that looked like, it was the smell of rain and the salt in the sea and the vile abomination of supposedly raspberry cafeteria jell-o that was somehow Ned’s favorite. 

_Did flying smell blue?_ Peter wanted to ask that, and he almost did. Was it jay blue or fake blueberry smoothie blue? What type of blue was the thunderstorm, was lightning blue or yellow? Most people said yellow, but he remembered a nugget of information that remarked on the hottest fires being bright cobalt. Lightning could heat up the air it passed through to nearly five times hotter than the sun, so it must be the same color blue as fire. 

Blue, blue, blue. God, his favorite color was blue. 

His favorite color changed every week, though. Last Monday, his favorite color was yellow because that’s what Mr. Stark said the lemon Skittles were. Yellow, like the sun and daffodils–but daffodils were also orange and white and every unimaginable color in between, so that was a wholly inaccurate comparison.

He wondered if flowers could be blue. 

He didn’t say any of that though, even if bark was peeling from the roof of his mouth and the wood in his throat eagerly awaited a response. It was just a strange thing to say, though he supposed nothing was strange anymore. Strange was an overused word for something merely abnormal, an inoffensive string of sounds with a negative connotation. That was something spiteful, Peter often thought, that people would automatically assume a word was bad only because it was used around bad things. 

Peter might’ve been strange in that way, then. He wasn’t sure if he was alright with that or not.

The word extraordinary would do for now. 

The boy who had flown gripped his hand strongly, and Peter’s head snapped up, startled. There was no needle against his neck, a tingling feeling like someone had wrapped a rubber band around his throat and made his brain fall asleep. Mr. Stark always said that he described his spidey senses like he got drugged, but they were sharp and stabbing, a mugging, not slow and predatory like a hunt. 

He gripped it back with renewed excitement and a smile, hoping his mouth looked pleasant enough. Like sunshine, May told him one time when he’d asked. Hopefully the flier didn’t get hurt, too much exposure to direct sunlight could cause cancer in the dermis. 

“I’m Harley,” Flier introduced, with an accent that caressed his ears differently than anything he’d ever heard before. “You ‘mus be ‘Eter.” 

It was deep, and lingered like a buzz on certain sounds. Short bursts of noise were said loudly and clearly, mostly vowels and vibrating, guttural syllables. The rest was said just barely and with an overemphasis on breath while speaking. It had little inflection, other than the slight, honeyed twinge of Southern.

It was riveting. 

“Yeah! I am him.” Peter’s chest heaved with the word, arm dragging Harley’s hand down and up with the air in his lungs. “Did the sky smell blue?”

“‘orry, what?” 

LED lights that sang like wasps filled the lobby of the Tower with a chorus of nothing, and he frowned. Mr. Stark coughed in the background, dry and forced, definitely trying not to laugh. The air moved then, delicately and deftly like he was making hand silent hand gestures. They were quick and somewhat stiff, not at all like what they were when he was sloppily talking.

Harley was looking at Mr. Stark doing it, he was sure of that. Eyes looking at him were a very… extraordinary sensation that always made themselves known whenever they started seeing him or refocused elsewhere. 

The forest waited patiently behind his tongue for the answer. 

“Blue doe-n’t really smell ‘li ‘muh. ‘Retty, though,” he answered, which made the trees and the rowdy leaves in them quake. “Fav-rite ‘olor.” 

“Okay!” Peter’s enthusiasm was no less vibrant. “Mine too!” 

Harley was surely the color of that thunderstorm. His very voice reminded him of the same one that he smelled like, the one that he must’ve flown through on the plane. He sounded so much like one, quiet and relaxing but demanding and grounding at the same time. His voice was booms and claps and whispers and soft like rain. 

He could hear Mr. Stark sigh in relief from behind the other boy.

“I’ve been told I have a good nose, anyways. Oh, you know what kind of blue might smell?” There was an ornery tremble in his left hand, quivering with excitement, the trees on his tongue had another question. And another, and another, and yet more. “Blue flowers. Do you know any blue flowers? Can flowers be blue?” 

“Um,” Harley hesitated, and Peter realized that their hands had never really separated. They were locked, and he didn’t mind at all. It was warm, and the tips of Peter’s fingers were cold today, perhaps white like frigid snow supposedly was. He wouldn’t know until someone remarked on it. “Bluebell,” was the simple, one-word response, but it was so, so beautiful. Confident and unique. A constant peal of thunder, and Peter thought that if he weren’t blind it would look exactly like lightning. 

“I haven’t heard of bluebells before, do they make noise like regular bells?” 

Harley squeezed his palm and dropped it heavily, though not unkindly. “‘Woodn’t know.”

Peter felt bad about interrupting his thunderstorm with his beam of sunshine smile. It must’ve been a searing one, because he could feel his own cheeks heat up with it’s arrival. Even his heartbeat sped up, probably trying to run from the UV radiation. “That’s alright, we can find out. It’s a tradition here, you walk in and you immediately have to do a scavenger hunt. You’re lucky though, Mr. Stark made me find his old gross socks one time.” 

Harley laughed at the accused man’s noise of indignation and beginning of a protest, before he loudly clicked his jaw shut with a huff. His senses warned him, and surely enough something light and plastic had been dropped on the floor.

The handle of Harley’s suitcase. Which made sense, because Mr. Stark was now very maturely leaving them at the door with his hand held up. 

“What’s he doing?” Peter asked Harley, who’s breath was ragged and labored from mirth. 

“‘Givin ‘th bird, Bluebell,” was his strained reply to both him and Mr. Stark. He assumed that Harley gave the billionaire the bird right back, judging by the guffaw from the elevator that was abruptly cut off by a pointed ding and the slamming of automated doors. 

Words were golden, he decided just then. Gold was a valuable color, worth ten million explanations to someone that wouldn’t really understand, no matter how many bumpy rocks Peter was given to feel. He would never truly grasp the concept of gold, never had ever since it was explained to him. It just felt too important, too all-encompassing to accurately experience sightlessly as he was. 

When Harley called him bluebell, specifically, was the brightest shade of that overwhelming color. Whatever the prettiest version of gold was, _that_ was it. It was his new favorite by far, it beat blue by a mile and then some. 

And it stayed his favorite even when next week came and passed. 

**Author's Note:**

> please boop yourself on the parkner discord server >>>> https://discord.gg/z5qMyh (invite expires in a day, just comment if you need a new one) 
> 
> my user is lil rat trash baby#4654 say hi or whatever!!! everyone is really sweet and its not as intimidating as it looks


End file.
